Ajax Girl

AT&T is to begin working with the RIAA and MPAA in a concerted effort to track down and punish AT&T internet users who download pirated music and movies.

According to the LA Times, AT&T have decided on the move after beginning to sell pay-television services, apparently they now see their interests as being more closely aligned with Hollywood than their millions of customers.

The New AT&T: Go directly to jail and do not pass go?

Dave Winer gets it 100% right:

If there were a death penalty for corporations, AT&T may have just earned it…What a lack of awareness of their relationship with customers. They should do things to reward customers for being smart enough to have chosen AT&T as their Internet service provider. Instead, they would make their customers the stupidest people on the planet, choosing the only ISP that will send you to jail to create a new business model for them. Instead of competing to provide great service at the lowest possible price, they want to drive their customers to financial ruin, for having made the mistake of choosing AT&T

There’s something very, very wrong when a company starts conspiring against its users. Perhaps the days of the customer being always right have passed? Certainly there will be many AT&T customers who will soon looking for internet access from alternative providers

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124657027/

Not much commentary is needed on this one. Here’s what happened:

1. eBay doesn’t allow merchants to use Google Checkout to settle eBay transactions. Google invited eBay online sellers attending eBay Live! in Boston this week to a party that they called the Google Checkout Freedom Party.
2. eBay decides to pull all U.S. advertising on Google.

3. Google backs down, cancels the party.

4. Google looks like a complete wimp; eBay looks like a bully.

The party appeared to be nothing more than Google poking a little fun at eBay’s restrictive policies. eBay hit back with the biggest weapon they had, suggesting that tension between the companies goes very deep.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124649270/

Nick Edgar started to play around with the Workerpool component and decided to build a distributed Mandelbrot generator:

A UI/administrator task would farm out work (columns in the Mandelbrot set) to different worker tasks, possibly running on different machines. As each worker sent in its result, the UI would draw the column, and respond with more work for the worker. It was a cool example, and looked cool too: due to different machines running at different speeds, you would see the results kind of shimmer in, with faster machines generating the leading edge, and slower machines trailing and filling in the blanks.

He put together a demo using Workerpool and without to compare.

After you start the simulation, click on the toggle button to see how the UI can remain responsive in the Workerpool case. Although you would be foolish to rush to use Workerpool thread for every little thing you do, it is nice to have this in the arsenal for truly long running actions.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mandelbrot-demo-using-a-workerpool

Here comes Cover Flow
As the world gets iPhonified and Leopardized, get ready for more Cover Flow (video), the scrolling interface with forward/backward arrows that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.

Jobs spent much of his talk showing how Leopard will help users more efficiently find files. Leopard’s new Finder will include Cover Flow, a new way to navigate through folders. Borrowed from iTunes, Cover Flow will let you flip through documents in the Finder, just like you can flip through songs in your iTunes library.

New Apple.com subnav
In a nod to this trend, Apple is using a scrolling horizontal subnav at the redesigned Apple.com:

Horizontal scrolling doesn’t often get this sort of prime time play since, as Jakob Nielsen puts it, users hate horizontal scrolling and “always” comment negatively when they encounter it.The cons in this case: Finding a specific app, say Logic Express, amidst the flying text in that Apple Mac section menu can bring on a headache. Arrow clicks seem like they should work like page up/down keys and scroll you to the next set of entries, but they don’t (you see four new choices, and three old ones remain). And while you can also jump to the section you want by clicking on its name, this less jarring alternative isn’t totally obvious at first glance.

Using motion to drop the hint
On the plus side, Apple uses a neat touch of motion at the site to get across the idea. When you land on the iPod + iTunes page, the slider is all the way to the left, on iTunes…

…once the page loads, it quickly slides to the second (and more important) area, Products. (The Mac section slider goes from Accessories to Macs.)

The motion is a nice, fairly unobtrusive way to drop the hint. Still, it will be interesting to see if it’s really enough to get the masses to adjust to the weirdness of horizontal scrolling on the web.

At least there’s more conventional text links in the footer:

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/464-cover-flow-and-the-scrolling-horizontal-subnav-at-the-new-applecom

Apple has announced a deal that will see the its popular iTunes service embedded into Bebo.

According to FT.com, Bebo’s 8.8m users in the UK and Ireland will be able to buy music directly from the profile of any musician who has a Bebo profile and whose music is available on iTunes.

The deal is a first for Apple. Bebo is a market leader in social networking in the United Kingdom despite not taking off to the same extent elsewhere.

It may not seem like major news, but to put it in perspective it’s on half hour leading story rotation on BBC World as I write this. It may also be indicative of a new direction for Apple; the wildly popular Facebook F8 is delivering benefits to many music related sites. To date Apple has remained silent in regards to its position on embracing the growing trend of social networking site integration.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124485623/

Jason Calacanis has announced the launch of Mahalo Greenhouse, a new program expanding the Mahalo Guide program to part times guides.

The new program allows members of public to build search results for search terms not currently included in Mahalo. If accepted, participants will be paid $10 to $15 per search result.

Further details are available here.

Mahalo launched 2 weeks ago with a human indexed search engine powered by the Wikimedia CMS. Mahalo shares similarities with Wikipedia and Netscape. The company is funded by Sequoia Capital, where Calacanis was previously Entrepreneur in Action.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124477411/

David Cann has mocked up an iPhone interface in JavaScript using Yahoo! UI.

His example is just a wrapper around Digg, but you can download the interface and put in your own application.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/iphone-interface-in-javascript

Eric Miraglia, of Yahoo!, has documented his explanation of what Douglas Crockford calls the JavaScript Module pattern.

Eric discusses the steps:

• Create a namespace object: If you’re using YUI, you can use the YAHOO.namespace() method
• Assign the return value of an anonymous function to your namespace object
• Add “private” methods and variables in the anonymous function prior to the return statement
• Do something useful with the pattern

Note that this technique is very generic, and you can do the same thing with other frameworks, or without any frameworks!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/a-javascript-module-pattern

Kris Zyp has released Resource Accelerate, “a J2EE web application filter that provides three signficant performance enhancements to web applications that use CSS, JavaScript, and shared images in a simple, easy to use package.”

• Caching Header Directives - this can significantly reduce the number of requests a browser needs to make for a web application when multiple pages share the same file resources.
• Gzip Compression - Resource Accelerate provides Gzip compression that can signficantly reduce the size of files that are transferred (often 60-80% for JS or CSS files).
• JavaScript Compression - Resource Accelerate can apply Dojo’s ShrinkSafe JavaScript compression as well.

Download from SourceForge.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/resource-accelerate-caching-and-compression

Loic Le Meur (on left in picture, along with me, Tariq Krim and Rodrigo Sepulveda), the well known French entrepreneur and blogger, is moving from Paris to silicon valley this summer to start a new video content company.

Le Meur founded uBlog (merged with Six Apart) and organizes of the annual Le Web conference. In an email, he told me it’s the perfect place for him and his family right now: silicon valley is the center of Internet innovation, and he says his children will learn to speak better English by living here. He also says he likes the acceptance of failure in silicon valley. “If you succeed it’s great, if you fail try again that’s ok, you learned. In Europe it’s usually if you succeed hide and if you fail you suck, so don’t try again,” he says.

With regard to his startup, he isn’t saying much yet. He does point out that its easier to gather a global team when the headquarters speaks English rather than French. He says that the path to success will be quicker from silicon valley. He also says:

I am currently in the process to create a fifth startup, based in the US and currently finalizing the initial funding. Can’t say much at this stage but it will be in the video content space, so hot and competitive these days because most remains to be done. I have uploaded to date about 450 podcasts, so I feel something very different than what we see today is ahead of us. What I can say is that I will crowdsource the company itself, grow it as I learnt in always beta mode and grow it with the feedback of my community. I have already gathered my advisory board, a group on facebook open to everyone

He’s also quick to point out that there are a lot of successful European startups. This is just the right move for him and his family, he says.

Whatever his startup, we’ll be covering it here on TechCrunch when it launches. Loic says to look for an early beta some time this Fall.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124442123/